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Qualcomm Says Eight-Core Processors Are Dumb
itwbennett writes "Following rival MediaTek's announcement of plans to release an eight-core processor in the fourth quarter, Qualcomm has declared eight-core processors 'dumb'. 'You can't take eight lawnmower engines, put them together and now claim you have an eight-cylinder Ferrari. It just doesn't make sense,' Qualcomm's senior vice president Anand Chandrasekher said, according to a transcript of his comments to Taiwan media provided on Friday. Asked whether Qualcomm would one day launch its own octa-core processor, Chandrasekher said, 'We don't do dumb things.'"
Fuck everything, we're doing five blades.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades,11056/ ...and then someone made one with five blades, and it's better enough that people will buy it.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
eight core processors are dumb. though not for the reason he gave. they are dumb because nothing supports 8 cores, so 99% of the time, the extra 2-6 cores are totally wasted. if the software would catch up to the hard ware, we might see more use in 8+ cores
But, but, i thought it is by design, to have the THUMB doing the DUMB things? Why the redirection? Why not just doing the DUMB without the THUMB!
another soon to be famous quote
No, but if you hook them up right you could end up with an 8 cylinder lawn mower..
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
If I tie 8 lawn mower engines together, can I belt up the blades to cut the lawns on each of the 8 motors as well? That would allow for a very wide cut of a large lawn. I think it all depends on the problem set, and how you solve it.
It's still true for some people.
...but every time some company says something is dumb, this usually means one of three things:
1) Our competitor has too many patents so we can't make it
2) We can't reach the quality/price of our competitor or
3) Not the product is too dumb, we're just too dumb to produce it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And my virtual machines say, "Shut your pie hole, Chandrasekher."
If more cores... more prescience? No need for spice melange, prices plummet. Recession.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Sounds like what Seymor Cray's famous quote
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"
Note quite exactly the same..but it's similar...BTW Cray turned out to be wrong. That being said I'd GLADLY pay money to watch 1024 chickens plow a field!
Is she eight times the mother of a woman with one kid?
love is just extroverted narcissism
If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
Example, Two suzuki hyabusa engines have been retrofitted together on a custom block to make a 2.6L v8 that revs to 13,000 rpm and puts out an insane amount of Horse power and torque. Its an engineering masterpiece that works. But lawnmower engines produce 5-7 hp on only 150ccs or 0.15L so 8 would be 1.2L. THen you have all that torque and horse power working together to spool up the engine there for producing way more power than was really imaginable.... All im saying is why not go for it,give a person more computing power the more productive a single human can be....
How much power will this thing take when all eight cores are running? Unless there is some significant breakthrough that MediaTek has yet to announce, this seems like a major issue for this chip, at least for mobile applications.
"Eight core processors are dumb (until we produce one) !!"
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
most people aren't going to use 8 cores, right now. For datacenter purposes, yes 8+ is needed, but your average user isn't running software that can make use of all 8 cores. Hell, I am an avid gamer and software developer and almost nothing I do uses up the 4 cores I have.
In a very limited sense that's a valid argument...
Well, there are perhaps 3 reasons for it making sense:
1. Yield: are tabbing processes good enough to get reliably high yields of such a complex part? At what cost?
2. Performance: when considering the likely thermal profile of an 8-core part, is it going to be particularly demanding or expensive to keep cool?
3. Support: do our current software designers, compilers and programmers have the experience and tools to make effective use of such a highly scalable platform?
It's also fair to say that it's entirely possible to get parallelism from lots of processors without the need for lots of cores in the same part. Any supercomputer engineer will tell you that.
However, what interests and disappoints me is the acute shortage of decently multi-threaded code in use today. I wonder if that Executive would make the same bold claim if we had a good source of multi-threaded apps to consume? Writing good, thread-safe code is hard. It was Bill Gates who famously pushed Intel to scale with speed rather than parallelism because his developers couldn't write good threaded code as they found it too complex (lots of poor tools at the time, I guess).
You can't take eight lawnmower engines, put them together and now claim you have an eight-cylinder Ferrari.
If Ferrari is the one doing it then yes they can claim that for whatever that gets them. And you certainly can join engines together to make a larger one. A W-16 is basically just two V-8s lashed together.
Asked whether Qualcomm would one day launch its own octa-core processor, Chandrasekher said, 'We don't do dumb things.'"
Maybe not but he clearly says dumb things.
Their servers also have a lot of lawnmower cores, nothing like the latest Haswell.
Including Microsoft switching to Hardware and Services as a company. Or the late Steve Jobs saying what was it, 10inch tablets are dumb, or 7 inch? I always forget which one.
8 cores is no more dumb than 4 or 2.
In fact, 8 cores is even less dumb for a mobile. 1 core can be dedicated entirely to doing those background app tasks from inactive applications, 1 for system, the rest for the active process(es).
Any not needed, just let him rest his little ol' head for a bit.
If only we could sleep part of our brain. Maybe one day I can just take some drug and it lets me go lucid thought so no need to since you could just create a lucid environment where time seemingly doesn't exist. (but is really just heavily slowed down)
Dream-like thought here we cooome! Coming to you never! (unless you are a mental freak where you researched on yourself to force hallucinations without going insane, in which case tell me all!)
Seriously, since when did it become acceptable for high profile executives to describe their competition in terms like "dumb"? Have we devolved to 5-year-olds? What is "dumb" is trying to make an argument without using any facts, and resorting to a vague metaphors about lawnmowers and spaghetti.
But 9 Women can do 9 math problems in parallel much faster than any one of them could do all 9 serially.
It all really depends on how many processes are running at once at a given time. If your O/S has a million services running in the background and at any time 8 of them could be competing for CPU-thread time, then no, 8 cores are not dumb.
If you're running DOS, then yes, 8 cores are useless.
Software that's single-threaded, no it doesn't benefit from more cores. But modern heavily-multi-threaded software can benefit. More cores means more threads can execute simultaneously, and if the workload's heavily parallelized you can get it done quicker. No, you can't get a supercar engine from 8 lawnmower engines. But if I have a truckload of boxes to move into a warehouse, it'll go twice as fast with 8 normal guys who can carry 1 box per trip each than with 1 really strong guy who can carry 4 boxes per trip. And when you consider that with CPUs the really strong guy isn't 4x as strong as the normal guys, he's more like maybe 50% stronger, the performance improvement for the 8 guys is even better. Assuming of course that you've got individual boxes to move. If they're all packed up inside a shipping container and you have to move the entire shipping container, then yeah you need 1 guy with a crane rather than 8 guys by hand. Modern software, though, is leaning towards breaking things down into small chunks that can be dealt with in parallel, so octacore CPUs are going to help and Qualcomm's living in the 90s.
If 8-core procs are dumb, then Intel, AMD, and Nvidia must be absolutely fucking retarded to make products with hundreds of cores in them.
Just because software doesn't use it right now, it doesn't mean that software won't use it soon.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
They used to say no tractor needed 8 jet engines, either!!!!1!2111!!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
$99 US, 16 core chip
http://www.parallella.org/
People realize that the Exynos Octo they're talking about isn't usable as an 8-core CPU, right?
The thing has four A15 cores, and four A7 cores. Only one of those groups can be used at a time. If you're using one or more A15 cores, the A7s are disabled, and vice versa.
I'm not actually sure what the point of what Samsung is doing is. The A15s can presumably be power gated, so switching to the "low power" option only makes sense if it can use less power than a single A15 core in a lower power state. Do the four A7 cores use less power than a single A15?
It seems to me like pairing up a single A7 with four A15s in a 4+1 solution (similar to what nVidia does with Tegra, except not using the same type of core as the +1) makes more sense.
There are diminishing returns, if you have a task that needs 3 processors, and you have 8, then you are "wasting" 8. To be most efficient, in this sense, you should have only one processor.
But the fact is, if you have a task that can be done with 3 processors and you have 8, it's STILL faster than if you had only 1. And THAT's what *I* care about.
Plus, if you have something that can be done with 7 processors, but you only have 4, it's going to be slower, than if you had 8 processors.
Course, the other problem is having smart enough control mechanisms (not sure if they are implemented in hardware or software) that will realize a task can be done with X processors, and will split up the task to use X processors. This, and the overhead of splitting the task in the first place, is why there are diminishing returns.
Still, if the processors themselves are cheap, and you care more about the time for the final result, rather than about the efficiency, then more seems like it's better.
Maybe what he meant was "going from quad processors to octo is too small of a jump to be worth the time -- check out our new tera-processor !" If so, that would put a completely different angle on his statement ...
dumb
dumb
dumb
dumb
dumb
dumb
"Dark Helmet: So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
It's surprising to me that tech forums aren't praising Qualcomm to the skies for actually having management that understands tech. How many other major American companies have a CEO who earned a Ph.D. in EECS from Cal-Berkeley ? I think Qualcomm's CEO as an example is especially important considering the utter disaster Dr. Hector Ruiz was at AMD.
How do you think the one british company makes (or made.. not sure if they still do or not) a V8 from two Hayabusa motors?
http://www.bimmerboost.com/showthread.php?7183-How-to-make-a-V8-from-two-Hayabusa-engines (Just one of the first links I found but I remember reading about the guys that did this YEARS ago)
the car does one task, it moves on the roads. Computers do more than one task so is that car bit really a good analogy? Now if he said software/OS don't support those 8 cores or something with meaning but maybe the guy was not technical and/or talking to marketing types who would believe him.
Man, I love Super Troopers!
It is the fallacy behind the Pi. I have 4 of them and use them for everything. However I'm not interested in taking significantly limited resources and programming against that in an effort to build my skills. I want the power. So a quad core Pi with SATA, Wifi, 2-4 GB of RAM, using just 5 watts of power, and much more, for $20.00 is just fine by me. I'd use that too. So would every other developer. I'm sure current developers hate the limitations of some of the devices out there.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
As an owner of an 8-core CPU, he's right.... for now. There's a pitiful number of uses for me to have anything more than 4 cores (some games I've seen dip into a 5th core for asset loading, and that's it). Hopefully when the PS4/XB1 come out developers will start writing games to use more than 3 cores for game logic. Unless browsers start loading pages outside of a single thread, I'm unlikely to need anything beyond a 2-core system for non-gaming.
Actually, you can take two V8 Volkswagon engine and strap them into a Bugatti Veyron, and have a 1100 horsepower beast.
...about Thomas Sterling's and Donald Becker's Beowulf Cluster at NASA?
No you don't use eight lawnmowers to build a Ferrari, you use eight lawnmowers to cut eight times as much grass at once. Dumb example, Mr. Chandrasekher.
-Bob-
At the previous company I worked for, a nightly software build ran for 15 hours on a couple of quad-core machines with 16GB of RAM. Building for a single target could easily take 6 hrs. I'd love to have a 32-core build machine with 128GB RAM and a terabyte of SSD.
Software compiling can often use as many cores as you throw at it. Video transcoding is parallelizable as well.
Personally I am waiting for Intel to kick out 16 core processors. I've been patient. It took them a looooooong time to come out with a 4 core processor. I am using every last bit of power this thing has for at least 30% of the average day (and today, its more like 98% for the whole day). I have software, now, today (actually about 3 years ago), that could use up to 64 cores (128 threads). All I ever see from them is "Well, we don't really want to make a processor that powerful. We would rather make something weaker, and stuff extra cores into something really expensive that most people can't get their hands on. We will wait till our competition starts eating our lunch with 16 and 32 core units before we build anything with more than 4 or 6 cores that are commonly available." So CUDA gains traction. Later Intel asks: "Where did we go wrong? Its like our name is Kodak, and we invented the digital camera, but we didn't develop it well enough for people to want to use, and suddenly our stock is de-listed and we are laying off thousands of people, and everyone else's stuff is better than ours." Yep.
You know what multiple cores are great for, that a very large segment of the population does? Image processing. A very large subset of things you can do to images responds very well to slicing an image into [#ofCores] slices, and then whacking away at them in [#ofCores] parallel.
I write SDR software, that kind of programming can really benefit from multicore hardware too. At least, the way I write it, it does.
Anyway, I think ol Qualcomm is lacking a certain basic understanding of what multicore architecture brings to the table. Er, phone. Desktop. Tablet. Whatever.
But that's ok. Manufacturers that remain mired in the past fall to their competitors and so self-select themselves out of the game.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm on an 8 core (well 4 but with hyperthreading) and I'm running my typical workload and my load average is over 8.
Arithmetic implies that I could make use of a 16 core system today.
No idea what the load average is on a crappy tablet/phone under a typical use case (games? browser?). But if ARM ever reaches into the realm of business workstations, it will want to have more than 4 cores.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The video is Here. Or, if you want to refute their "Strap lawnmower engines together to make a ferrari", I'd like to go one step further and point out this 24-chainsaw-engine Motorbike.
I thought the reasoning behind multiple cores was so you could power off the ones you're not using. It's not that you're taking 8 lawnmower engines and turning them into an 8 cylinder Ferrari engine, but you're putting 8 smaller lawnmower engines on your lawnmower so instead of using the big 80HP engine when you're just trimming a narrow stretch of grass, you only need to power up one 10HP engine while the rest of them remain powered off. If you're cutting wider stretch of grass, you can use 2 engines, etc. So you save energy by only using as many cores (engines) that you need for the task.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/116477973057408152462/posts/6eAyT6P5twA
It is marketing bullshit. It is not supposed to make sense.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Nah, you're just doing it wrong. Take list of names, then mark as, or make sublists, the main list with [#ofThreads] of alphabet, which involves no more than looking at the 1st character and using that to target a list - a jump table of [alphabet] size would allow doing this in one instruction. There's a need to make sublists anyway, so creating them in a "deal the deck" way incurs no significant overhead. Hand off to multithread sort, result comes back in already completely in order, just link the new list ends in your [#ofTHreads] order and you're done.
There are certainly hard-to-parallelize problems, but alphabetizing a list isn't one of them.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Hey Qualcomm, if you're going to use an analogy to show how your competition is dumb, you may want to make sure the analogy you choose doesn't make you look even dumber. Of course you don't throw 8 engines together to make an 8-cylinder engine. You throw 8 cylinders together within a single engine. You don't throw 8 single-core cpus together to make an 8-core cpu. You throw 8 cores together within a single cpu.
"Asked whether Qualcomm would one day launch its own octa-core processor, Chandrasekher said, 'We don't do dumb things.'" "
And yet Qualcomm will build 8 core for mobile one day like Apple made iPad mini.
SIX blades! The best REAL men can get.
Oh and lifehacker or something like that did a user survey and the five blade does end as the most popular. People can joke all they want but they want a safe easy shave in the morning.
And how many cores do the new consoles have? Both 8. But hey, Sony and MS are both stupid...
Well there goes my argument.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't see why he is making the analogy that cores are seperate engines. It's more like each core is a cylinder. That is a much better analogy in my opinion, and makes far more sense.
Qualcomm is likely referring to Samsung's octo core "big.LITTLE" SoCs. These chips have 4 performance cores and 4 power sipping cores. Software switches between performance and power saving modes. These chips make sense anywhere quad core makes sense AND they can be a little more power efficient.
This 4+4 strategy is basically the next iteration of power saving through dark silicon. Transistors are cheap so use piles of them but only power on the ones necessary at the time. Having 4 power saving cores seems like overkill but I imagine directly paralleling the 4 performance cores may make the switching more seemless / faster.
segfault
The summary gets it exactly right when it says something like 8 lawnmowers doesn't equal a Ferrari engine. The trouble is it is so difficult to find an actual benchmark for processors that measures speed and reliability. The average person does not get into the details and looks at something like higher hertz is better or more cores is better. All else being equal, this is true. I would confidently say that 50% of the population would buy "8 Core" machine that uses Pentium 1 processors over a single core Pentium 4. Consumers shoot themselves in the foot when they don't do their research before buying a computer. There are so many "features" on current processors that are completely incomparable that buying the best processor becomes a crap shoot unless you want to spend hours searching for real benchmarks.
The Chandrasekher Limit is now 8 down from 2.864 × 10^30.
Pray that Qualcomm does not reduce it any further.
He says to tell Qualcomm that free lunches are over.
If you have 8 busy processes (or threads, or whatever you call them) and your architecture can give each one a core, AND there aren't other bottlenecks like memory, I/O, etc., then you can utilize those 8 cores pretty well.
But if you have only one or two ready-to-run processes/threads/whatever at a time, OR if there is contention elsewhere, then yeah, it's a waste.
What else is new?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Not being very knowledgeable on razors, where would one find a Wilkinson blade and/or appropriate razor?
An amazon search turns up a Parker 60r/91r and Shark/Bluebird blades
Well, I am using a straight-edge razor and did not have to buy anything but razor soap for about 20 years. Though my mother objected to the look of my strop and did buy me a new one a few years ago.
Naturally, you need to get the hang of it before being fit for company. The main advantage against the "safety" razors is that a knife does not clog up, regardless of how infrequent you choose to shave. I would assume that multi-blade razors might offer a closer shave, but the few times I had to revert to them (like when I had to have a wedge polished out because my !@#$ brother played with the razor and dropped it) I did not really get the hang of them and was more annoyed than anything. My skin was happier with the knife.
Software that's single-threaded, no it doesn't benefit from more cores
But - to an extent - running multiple single-threaded applications does. You're still bound by I/O, but it lets you do things like have something ripping a CD/DVD or doing a/v encoding running the background while you're still able to play a game online. In most cases add an Antivirus to the mix and it's quite often sucking up a good portion of a core when you're hitting a lot of files (again, also I/O, but SSD's help)
Most people wouldn't multi-task enough to see the advantage of 8 cores, but they used to naysay multi-core as well. Go back to a high-Mhz single-core machine and tell me it's not painful.
Quad ok, but 8 is just dumb.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
8 lawnmower engines Ferrari
But is it still true that 9 pregnant women can produce a baby in only a month?
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this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
I was instantly reminded of Steve Jobs saying that 7-inch tablets were dumb.
Then I was reminded of an education conference I attended long ago and said that lots of PCs could be connected together and work on the same problem. The University's CS prof just blinked like he'd never heard anything so wacky.
Oh yeah, and I also remember IBM laughing at how cute PC's were. A year or two before they started sweating blood.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Eudora.
Short-sighted people call many things "dumb".
There's a fundamental perception that Qualcomm is missing; Multicore processors are not x times as good at doing a task, unless that task can be threaded to multiple components, but most business and consumer computing devices at this point ar not doing one thing at a time. As long as the OS has the capability of dropping a task into a memory space and assigning that to a processor, the muti-core processors will always offer a benefit to the user with more than one thing at a time going on (which includes the OS itself, and all of the myriad of drivers, checkers, updaters and such we have running in the background while we do the "oe thing" on our desktop.
8 lawn mower engines doesn't make a Ferrari - true. However, 8 cars will probably haul 8 times the load in one trip. You're really saying that 8 processors can (potentially) do 8 times the work in a unit of time, not that it goes 8 times faster for one trip. That's the whole point of parallelism.
Wide roads trump fast roads when there's a lot of traffic.
So go ahead and use 4 times the power because that's not "A Dumb Thing(TM)"...sure.
You can't take eight lawnmower engines, put them together and now claim you have an eight-cylinder Ferrari. It just doesn't make sense,
You're right, it doesn't make sense. But then who, if anyone, is making such claims? Or did you, perhaps, invent those claims just so you could knock them down?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I want more memory and IO bandwidth. I'm sick to death of manufacturers thinking 32GB is a LOT of storage. It isn't. 128Gb would be a LOT. ANOTHER THING...Buy a REAL WiFi chipset and antenna. Lame reception is no longer acceptable.
Cheap disposable razors leave my neck looking like I got in a fight with a chainsaw.
I use double edge safety razor blades. Several uses out of them and they are dirt cheap. I can never go back to anything else now.
Intel is planning to put out a 48-core mobile CPU in less than a decade ( http://www.extremetech.com/computing/139267-intels-48-core-supercomputing-smartphone-cpu-is-less-than-a-decade-away ), with the main benefit being improved energy efficiency. That being said, it may be a smart short-term business move for Qualcom to not pursue 8 core chips in the meantime, and calling everyone else stupid is a convenient way to justify that to stockholders. Myself, I would love to have excessively powerful mobile devices that far exceed the needs of the average consumer. I currently lug around a gargantuan Lenovo w530 which, for the majority of its use, is docked and closed. If I could just dock a phone with workstation-grade hardware in it, that would be much more convenient for me.
The most common internal bus designs are simple and ill suited to large SMP. And eight 1GHz engines is large from an OS and application point of view.
That being said an improved system architecture could change the rules. Current RAM and ROM bandwidth is over taxed but graphic devices may provide a model for how to improve this tangle. Nothing less than a full data path redesign including ECC analysis is going to allow large core counts to play well. The data path redesign may trigger OS and application redesign.
The results of eight+ core designs will tell us more when we get them in a lot of hands.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
the new Moto X uses 8 cores to extend battery life, dedicating individual cores to singular tasks...
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/inside-story-of-moto-x/
that is NOT "dumb" but actually what the rest of us like to refer to as "innovation"
Numerous commentators here have successfully pointed out in numerous ways that there's nothing inherently "dumb" with producing eight-core machines.
Among the mentioned:
* Numerous VMs working together to perform complex network tasks
* Eight lawnmowers getting eight times as much grass cut in the same time -- not competing in car races
I think what's obvious is that the comment made by Qualcomm may have been silly and perhaps even meant to be childish.
Are we really to believe that they held a meeting, shared lunch, ate yogurt, called it a day, relaxed their ties and blouses and said:
"So, after all's said and done, let's just tell Taiwan that eight cores are TOOOOPIIITTTHHH! BUH HUH DUH!!!"
The concept is so utterly ridiculous I have to wonder what the perceived "angle" is, or what possible advantage could be gained by the comment.
Will the average Wal-Mart and Best Buy shoppers somehow get wind of these comments and make well-informed decisions to go with cell phones and computers containing Qualcomm architecture?
"Yo honey don't buy the faggy brand that's all stupid. We like money! Buy the one that's made by the sexy people that call the other people stupid. Stupid, thtupid people!" *spit & drool while talking, etc.*
Will there be some contingency of "nerds" that reads the comments and just latches on with teeth-bared frenzy, bits and clings tenaciously to Chandrasekher's buttocks, frothing at the mouth and screaming (between clenched teeth full of buttock meat), "FFRRKKK MEDIATEK! FRK UUU! HRRRGGGHHH," eventually to develope a symbiotic parasitic relationship with Chandrasekher and become an extension of his buttocks (perhaps to one day be meat between the rabid teeth of some other nerd?)
That also seems highly unlikely. Even a quick perusal of the comments here at Slashdot reveals not only do numerous people conclude that Chandrasekher made asinine statements, but also that those who agree with Chandrasekher are putting thought behind their decisions and also don't resemble lampreys.
But anybody could have predicted that the more mindless masses would never be exposed to Chandrasekher's words and also that those who are exposed will put well-informed thought behind their interpretations of his statements.
Well, "anyone", but possibly except for Chandrasekher.
Hmm... could Chandrasekher just be ... *gulp* ... TOOPID?
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
http://i.imgur.com/3TJxrtx.jpg
Well, the Pi can give you a 1GHz CPU with dual-core GPU, Ethernet, USB and 512MB RAM for $25 at 3.5W. There is just not a budget (yet) for what you're asking and probably by the time it is, you'd be saying "quad core and 4GB RAM? I want the power. So a 16 core with 32GB RAM using just 1W of power...".
The biggest cost of hardware these days sits in manufacturing and transportation costs and sometimes licensing, not component costs (the component costs of the Pi are probably ~$5)
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
(*puts on sunglasses*) ...to the *core*!
YEEEEAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!
It is the fallacy behind the Pi. I have 4 of them and use them for everything.
Like what?
must be written to use those extra cores. If its not, those cores sit idle. Most people only need peocessors with one or 2 cores.
If the game industry ever moves from putting most of their effort in graphics, graphics, and more graphics, I see no reason why extra cores couldn't be used on improving AI and physics experiences.
The reason? Because most of the physics boils down on doing the same kind of operation over a big collection of number. i.e.: something a which GPU are already excelling.
You're going to gain much more from OpenCL acceleration than from multi cores.
The only reason it's not done this way yet, is repeatability. If your going to have any gameplay impacting physics (destructible/modifiable environment, for example, instead of just some eye-candy death animation or explosions) and you do multi-player, you need that all player have the same gameplay-impacting result of physics (if one player blows a hole in a brick wall, you need the same shape of hole for each other of the player who might want to go through).
You just can't have the server keep track of every single particle of the explosion leading to the whole. So the server can't synchronise it across player.
So each player's game client has to run its own simulation, and all simulation have to arrive at the same end-result to avoid artifacts (other player seem to walk through walls and obstacles because in their simulation, the terrain-destruction-simulation that opened the way went differently).
So for now, they are done on CPU, becuase CPUs are currently more predictable down to the rounding errors.
But this situation is starting to get better (thanks to OpenCL, among other).
In the short term, CPU are desirable because of more predictible and reproducible floating-point behaviour. Multi-core helps going faster.
In the long term, GPU are going to be more desirable, because their better at number crunching, specifically at the "crunch a zillion of numbers, all in the exact same way" kind of number crunching.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
http://www.fs-uk.com/forum/gallery/108399_11_05_12_4_39_12.jpeg
I agree that that many cores in a modern phone would be a completely wasteful drain on resources, but the way smartphones usage is being changed will be what shapes the future of processors, not what a company thinks. Take, for example, the Ubuntu Edge. Whether or not this machine ever comes to the public, the idea behind it is one that has become commonplace: a phone that can be used as a desktop computer. Now, when it comes to desktop computing, I prefer to use a minumum of 4 cores (I'm a video editor, so the power to run multiple high-resource programs is paramount), meaning that if I were to one day want to try using a phone/desktop hybrid, I would sure as hell want more cores. But even from the point of view of the average smartphone/tablet user, applications are becoming more advanced and resource intensive; games demand higher power GPUs and more RAM than ever before. As this trend continues, as it inevitably will (it is the wont of technology, after all), we shall see Qualcomm eat humble pie.
I mean like - what stuff need more than 640K of ram? just think about it - thats a lot of code and data!!!!
He makes a valid point, but misses the direction and point of the 8 cores
(though it's up to 10-12 now, or 100 in a non-x86 compat 1Ghz Intel proc).
Intel hit the wall on processor development when it came to *speed* (lets call that *height*) - the pinnacle of that was in the Pentium IV days when things were in the 4GHz range and trying to climb. Unfortunately, with the materials and processes available to Intel at the time (and still, today, though occasional research rumor indicate possibilities for that to change), too much heat was generated in 1 small place to make further increases practical w/o more elaborate kinds of cooling that would become more expensive and take more space.
So Intel went *Wider*.... it was a way of maintaining profit margin on high end -- they could sell to providers and position processors to "Cloud providers", thus enabling the old-regime of large-central computing resources to reawaken -- the days of the personal computer look shaky at best.
Combined with relative cost to people, and their absolute cost, people will *likely*, less be able to afford PC(Personal Computers) -- portables/handheld that let you tap into a cloud are the growing market, where you also, have no privacy -- as the US government points out --
As soon as your data is moved to a cloud, you lose all constitutional protections under their current claims to power (the people need to get pissed enough to take that back through whatever mean (with box being
a first choice on that list [ballot])).
Meanwhile Intel can keep up their profits (for a little while -- a retreat to the high end has always been the start of the end for a corporation) as they go to fatter, 'wider' processors that will have to be positioned to providers -- as they will be the only ones that can make full use of them (as scores-thousands of users login to their own 'virtual machine' in the cloud)....
Microsoft's latest server farms are powered by chickens. It's all part of their eco-friendly, low-impact server strategy. When the chickens' computation begins to slow with age, they send them to KFC for "recycling."
The big secret isn't that Microsoft's server farms are chicken-based, it's that they are running Linux ;-)
Wimp.com/themower
Honda should factor in an eightcore on their next revision.
Is a 130mph good enough for ya: Http://www.wimp.com/themower
Maybe when this guy gets done making buggy whips, and he dies, then the next person will take an interest in making things that people want. If they want eight cores, they will get eight cores.
In the context of phones, the MediaTek has all high-performance cores. Not high performance by desktop standards, but relatively high performance. To be clearer: In the context of general-purpose consumer computing (which includes phone CPUs) there is currently little advantage to having more than 4 cores that have essentially the same power and performance characteristics.
The advantage of big.LITTLE is that you pair a set of high-performance/high-power CPUs with a set of low-performance/low-power CPUs, and in theory get the best of both worlds. It's not clear if this is true in practice, unfortunately.
Hey, Didn't Apple also say the same thing about "people not wanting bigger phone displays" until THEY come out with a bigger display. Same for multi-core phone CPUs... They said that there was no need to have multiple CPUs until THEY come out with a dual-core handset, then nobody remembers their previous flip-flop. Similar to politicians and so called "Analysts"
This "senior vice president" used to run Intel's mobile strategy and was very bullish about Medfield, so his track record of predicting commercial success is not great...
That, and he's fundamentally wrong in that a V8 actually IS pretty much 8 single cylinder engines mated together. It's 8 intake runners feeding eight combustion chambers with eight intake valves and eight spark plugs pushing 8 pistons, followed by eight exhaust valves opening from the 8 exhaust cams on the cam shaft ...
His argument is more akin to saying that V8 engines are a dumb idea that could never work, that what you need is bigger cylinders, not more of them. He's precisely wrong - cars from the most anemic to the fastest use a fairly small range of cylinder sizes, they just use more cylinders for more power - anywhere from two cylinders to twelve.
Kawasaki lawn mower engines, for example, have two cylinders of 218cc each. Ferraris have twelve cylinders of 500cc each.